My name is Tammy Bortoletto and I am writing you today to talk about our current medical system and how it requires serious attention, also to caution the Campbell River community when it comes to calling 911 for a serious emergency situation.
I have been in and out of the hospital since I was 17-years-old for various medical/health reasons from when I was a child. I was told I would never walk again and later on in life, I had to have a shunt installed due to neurological damage.
On Jan. 28, I was downtown at work cleaning hand just finished up and went to have a pop before heading home around 11:30 p.m.
I arrived at home shortly after and I made myself some toast and had another sip of pop.
Soon after, I started feeling really dizzy and my chest was hurting really badly.
It started to travel over my heart and I started to panic as I couldn’t catch my breath and my back/neck started hurting.
I thought maybe it was a blockage within my shunt or worse, maybe it was a heart attack coming on.
I called out to my son Andrew to call 911 right away, as I had a bad feeling.
From that point on, my son proceeded to call 911 and when the operator answered, my son was immediately put on hold. My son was on hold for around four minutes in total before they finally answered his call for help.
To me, it felt a lot longer than this as I was in immense pain and my leg started to go numb due to my previous neurological damage.
In my opinion, this is completely outrageous. What if I was having a stroke where the first 10-20 minutes count towards a better recovery rate or worse, what if I was shot?
To be put on hold is not by any means okay when you are in bad enough shape to have co call for an ambulance.
To me, that is serious and all calls should have someone’s full, undivided attention and shouldn’t be put on hold for any reason.If we are that short-staffed for jobs of this nature, then maybe we should look into this issue moving forward.
If there was only one operator working that night, why is there no relief workers to help?
Luckily, I only live a few blocks away from the hospital/ambulance station and it took them only 15 minutes to respond to my cry for help.
At this time, the ambulance personnel asked what was wrong and what I was feeling. I tried to explain but wasn’t able to talk well. I was then loaded up and taken to Campbell River Hospital where they sent me for an ECG test and they ran a number of other tests on me as well as took some blood.
I still don’t really know what was wrong with me and I was told by the nurse that because I had been sick and coughing so much that it could have jolted my heart a bit and cause the feeling of a heart attack forming. I was kept overnight where I was monitored throughout the night and finally released the next day.
I believe that people’s health and lives come first and for most and for this response out of our current system makes me have little to no faith in any future health emergencies that I may have.
Tammy Bortoletto
Campbell River
ED NOTE: A previous version of this letter contained incorrect information. In that version, the author indicated a belief the City of Campbell River fire dispatch centre answers 9-1-1 calls for ambulance. This is incorrect, within the North Island 9-1-1 coverage area, when a person calls 9-1-1 for a medical emergency, it is transferred from EComm to BC Ambulance directly. This version has been updated.
